We are preparing to build nothing at all. We only want to construct words assembled with voices, gestures, movements that form dialogues, soliloquies, rants, asides, metonyms…

We do not want to build a place but many places, as many places as we build audiences.

Throughout the city of Guimaraes, we will devise performances to create ephemeral spaces, mental constructions, using local and remote narratives, found objects, and fictions of every kind. Guimaraes will be a stage where a group of performers suggest singular ways of thinking space.

We will recite one speech for the duration of every traffic light, within a prescribed perimeter, and another one at a tram stop that will take as long to deliver as the tram takes to arrive. For one particular performance, we will be using as many words as there are previously counted trees in a particular square. We are also going to measure sound as it changes volume in a pre-established locality in Guimaraes, to then translate these changes into gestures and have performers interpreting them later. The performers’ movements might be based on the speed of audible mixing spoons at a local café, as they hit or slide past the sides of their mugs, or on the precise routes followed by a few shopping carts at the local supermarket.

The series of performances entitled “O inutil de cada um” is inspired by the endless writings also penned by Mario Peixoto. Peixoto, a brazilian filmmaker who in 1930 at the age of 19, had already delivered one of the most beautiful silent movies ever made, bought a 17th century pirate house in a tiny island and went missing for a spell in order to tend to his writings. He dedicated himself to the restoration of a 13m x 13m adobe house and to the creation of a nostalgic paradise at constant odds with its own vegetation and weather conditions. Finally financially ruined, he was forced to give it up.

Mental spaces:

Imagine a place, a space, built on a small island in the middle of a big river. The water should run strongly on either side. You would have to cross the river to get to it. Once you get to the bank and look at the space in front of you, something should make you want to swim against the strong currents to get into it. I will make a drawing of that something.

I walk and find myself behind these walls. I think of putting a roof on them and stay here for some time. I look for something to cover the roof. I lay on the floor looking at the roof but I decide to poke a hole onto it to allow some light get through it. The light and the dust make a straight line from the roof to the floor and there, on the floor, I follow every day this clear dot moving slowly.

I would go to the rooftop of every tall building in the city and collect anything that can fit in my pocket. I would then set these objects on a bench, in a park. I would urge you to use them to build yourself a place.

There is a space under a parking garage in the city center. It has a window on the ceiling that looks to the bottom of a car. There are only narrow ramps going to it and from it. Several spiral pipes carry the sounds of the garage into a synthesizer that modifies them and turns them into vocal chants. You start recognizing the cars by their bottoms and you tell me where they have been by the metal marks and color of the rust.